SOURCE: "Women and Marriage in Abraham Cahan's Fiction," in Studies in American Jewish Literature, edited by Daniel Walden, Vol. 3, 1983, pp. 26-39.

In the following essay, Kress discusses Cahan's portrayal of women and marriage, arguing that his characters' ambivalence about marriage parallels their ambivalence about assimilation in America.

Much of Abraham Cahan's fiction reflects upon the institution of marriage in the lives of his Jewish immigrant characters at the turn of the century. Unlike writers of sentimental fiction, Cahan does not focus exclusively on the vicissitudes of courtship prior to a happily-ever-after marriage presumably to be enjoyed by the characters after the book is closed; rather, as the realist praised by William Dean Howells, he shows us glimpses of court-ship in a sweatshop, of difficult married life, of the pain of adjustment to life in the new world. In Cahan's fiction, the terrors of being unmarried are balanced against...